1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for centrifuging biological material containers, or test tubes, in a context of laboratory automation.
2. Description of the Related Art
The scientific progress and the development in technology produced a major development in Laboratory Medicine with a subsequent growth of the requested analyses, both in typology and number.
The efficiency of a laboratory is evaluated by calculating the TAT (Turn Around Time), i.e. the time elapsing between the moment in which a test tube, once identified, starts the processing process and the moment in which the results of the required analyses on such a test tube are obtained. The lower the TAT, the higher the efficiency of a laboratory.
With the introduction of automation, the Laboratory Medicine has faced the increase in required analyses while succeeding in accelerating the application times of the analyses (reduction of TAT) and improving the analytical quality thereof, due to the features of better precision and accuracy of the automated processes.
Automation means both the use of devices adapted to automate single processing steps and analysis of the biological material samples, and the use of conveyors adapted to automatically convey such samples to said automation devices possibly interfaced to the conveyor. The automation development also involved the step of centrifuging the biological material samples, thus introducing devices adapted to simultaneously centrifuge a multitude of test tubes, such as for example centrifuges capable of processing batches of 80 or more test tubes at once, and which are therefore not suitable for managing the processing of single test tubes whose analysis are urgently required (in cases of patients undergoing surgery or similar emergencies inside hospital wards or emergency rooms), nor suitable for obtaining low TAT values for each single test tube as well.
The automation systems implemented and used heretofore only dealt with the automation of the traditional centrifuging cycle which was once manually operated, by replacing the human operator with operations performed by robot operators.
This setting has made a series of limits arise, which are inherent to the original process and thwarted the evolution towards concepts which are new and more suitable for an automatic process, while succeeding in overcoming the constraints of the manual process.
In actual fact, aiming to help the human operator in order to provide him/her with a limited and time-constrained burden of load/unload, the traditional process pushed towards the implementation of centrifuging machines of ever-increasing size and power.
But these machines do not provide for any optimisation of the time for processing a test tube because, due to the organisation of the loading/unloading process of the centrifuges, the test tubes being centrifuged in batches may remain even several minutes waiting in the centrifuge prior being loaded or unloaded.
JP-61-013158 discloses an apparatus with a plurality of centrifuges.